About 70 Harvard undergraduates walked out an introductory economics course taught by Greg Mankiw Wednesday. The students then joined up with Occupy Boston movement, and posted an open letter on the Harvard Political Review:
Today, we are walking out of your class, Economics 10, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course. We are deeply concerned about the way that this bias affects students, the University, and our greater society.
As Harvard undergraduates, we enrolled in Economics 10 hoping to gain a broad and introductory foundation of economic theory that would assist us in our various intellectual pursuits and diverse disciplines, which range from Economics, to Government, to Environmental Sciences and Public Policy, and beyond. Instead, we found a course that espouses a specific—and limited—view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.
A legitimate academic study of economics must include a critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws of different economic simplifying models. As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics. There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.
The lecture (ironically about wealth distribution, according to Mankiw’s blog) then proceeded normally. Another Harvard student, Jeremy Patashnik, also wrote a pointed defense of the class in response to the letter:
As an economics concentrator, an Ec 10 alum, and a self-identifying liberal (on most issues), I think this walkout is regrettable, because the class gave me an excellent economic foundation that has been crucial to my success as a student and my development as a thinker, and furthermore, these protesters’ arguments (or lack thereof) against the course are entirely unfounded.
One would presume that, in this letter, students would lay out precisely what biases they find objectionable in Ec 10, but the closest they come to doing so is when they say, “There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.”
Incidentally, the authors of this letter are in for a treat: there’s plenty of Keynesian theory to come in the second semester of Ec 10. In fact, Mankiw is a great Keynes admirer, and once wrote, “If you were going to turn to only one economist to understand the problems facing the economy, there’s little doubt that that economist would be John Maynard Keynes.” The only reason that these students have not yet studied the father of modern macroeconomics in Ec 10, of course, is that the first semester of the class is devoted to microeconomics.
As though nobody ever got to hear about Keynes.
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